Thanks for the comment! We started with subscribing to some brands manually with our own number to see if the idea was viable for about a month before trying to do it at scale by looking for which brands offered SMS and using something like a Twilio virtual phone number to get the message they send to us via API to put in the database. We currently spend a few hours every month to do that and to add more features.
Used it some years ago and thought that it was a really good front-end to the Steam store since the search interface is a bit lacking. Am surprised to see that this has millions of visitors but has such low running cost. Must be really highly optimized SQL queries and code there!
Recently decided to launch MessageDuck: https://www.messageduck.com after working on a few side projects but never actually launching for many years. It is similar to Mailcharts and ReallyGoodEmail, but for SMS which Mailcharts has as well but the price is out of our range.
Basically it is a library of thousands of SMS messages to help marketers get the latest SMS data and launch their campaign in minutes instead of days. Currently earning $0 and incurring some cost of about less than $100 a month but overall it meets our own need. It was an internal tool we used but we decided to launch it to the open web and see if there was any demand for it. Currently it has all the features of a MVP and already works great for us but we are adding some new features every month as well.
We have been reading these $500/month posts year after year and recently we have been holding back on launching our own as well. Recently we finally decide to just went in after months of working on it. It is called MessageDuck (https://www.messageduck.com) which was built while we were looking for a good solution for SMS data marketing.
We built this after we noticed that there was not much good solution except one which is quite pricey called MailCharts SMS. We are still working on it and we also have a code YC that you can use for 10% off our Pro Plan.
Hopefully, we can reach $500 by 2023 and we can Show and Tell as well.